


Kagome Kagome

by aussiebrd23, LightDarkPheonix



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, But in this she's a bitch, F/F, F/M, I like her, M/M, Mary Being manipulative, Mary is a bitch, Mental Health Issues, OCs - Freeform, Oblivious John, Papa bear John, Parentlock, Some explicitish language, Suicide Attempt, Um... what else, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 02:12:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/933952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aussiebrd23/pseuds/aussiebrd23, https://archiveofourown.org/users/LightDarkPheonix/pseuds/LightDarkPheonix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One Sunday is August, soon before her 12 birthday, Victoria Holmes attempts suicide. When she wakes up, Sherlock and her girlfriend Margo are there. But John isn't. According to his girlfriend Mary, he doesn't care.<br/>A few years later, John and Sherlock are together, and have been since six months after her attempted suicide. Something happens, which causes some things kept secret to come to light.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. World's End Dancehall

**Author's Note:**

> Hi people. This is my first attempt on this account to write a multi-chapter fic. As always, I own nothing. Trigger warning: Victoria attempts suicide in this chapter, and I’m pretty explicit in my description. I know Mary’s a bit of a bitch in this one, but I just wanted to experiment with that portrayal. I actually really like the character, just wish that she didn’t exist. Sherlock might be a bit OOC, but that’s because this is an AU where Sherlock was raising Victoria when John met him. John doesn’t actually pity them, that’s just Mary being manipulative.
> 
> The chapter of this title comes from the Vocaloid song World’s End Dancehall by Megurine Luka and Hatsune Miku. The title of the story comes from the Vocaloid song Kagome Kagome, also sung by Megurine Luka and Hatsune Miku. I don’t want ff.net to freak out on me, so you’ll have to google them. Sorry. They’re really good, but Kagome Kagome is in the horror genre, and the characters of WEDH kill themselves, so they aren’t for everyone.

“Kagome, Kagome,” I sang softly to myself. Circle you, circle you. A song based off a creepypasta that I’d covered, and that had ended up being the reason I was about to hang myself. “Kagome, Kagome,” I’d shown her the song because I’d thought she’d like it. I’d started considering John my second dad a little while ago, and since he was dating Mary I wanted to see if I could extend my small definition of family to her. It was the first cover I’d ever made, and I’d spent a month working on the video and the audio.

Her reaction was the polar opposite of positive. Bad enough that she was completely freaked out by the song (it’s about Nazis who experimented on young Japanese children, I know not a good song for a 14 year old to listen to, but it’s really good, trust me on this), but it also seemed to cement in her mind that I was a freak, like my dad. 

Before I showed her the song, I was ignored by her. I might as well have been a piece of furniture for all she cared. After, she made a point to be mean to me. I heard her say to a friend once that her reason was that she thought that I would get between her and John. Unlikely. While I could see that my two dads were very much in love, I am not one for matchmaking. Also, dad would have reacted badly to any attempts to convince him that John’s reciprocation of his feelings was anything but projection on his part.

It started out as a small thing. She refused me to call me by name. My name is Victoria Holmes-Watson (well, actually just Holmes, but I started tacking the Watson on soon after John started living with us), but she’d call me “you,” or “she” if referring to me in the third person.

It then progressed to that classic name bullies like to call members of the Holmes family, “Freak.” I pretended to ignore this, but it hurt. Because when does being called a freak not hurt? But it wasn’t any worse than I’d gotten at school, so I didn’t react.

After John and Mary’s relationship started splintering, as both dad and I had predicted but had been scared to state, she started verbally abusing me. Mary told me that John only stayed with dad because he thought that I was being abused, and that he pitied me for having a father like him. And since she’d also convinced John that we needed a break from him, I actually started to believe her.

I don’t think she realized this, but us Holmes have a history of low self-esteem issues. My Uncle Mycroft has a disturbing combination of bulimia and anorexia that manifests itself whenever something bad happens at work, and my dad has a form of bipolar disorder that is the cause for his violent bouts of boredom or extreme spurts of agitation. I’m “lucky” in that I have textbook bipolar. Sort of. Because the depression is rare, but when it hits, it hits me bad. And when it hits I am utterly convinced that I am a worthless human being utterly devoid of any reason for existence, but also that I am completely unworthy of affection Which annoys Margo (my girlfriend) to no end, as she is constantly telling me that I am awesome. 

So not only did this keep me from trying to split her and John up (unnecessary, as she was doing a good job of it herself, being a whiny clingy bitch) but it drove me into frequent bouts of depression. The kind of depression that makes it hard to get up out of bed in the morning. 

Sherlock noticed and tried to help. Contrary to popular belief, he is an amazing dad. But I believed Mary, though I didn’t tell anyone what she said, so I refused to let him tell John. I didn’t want to be a burden on him, because I thought that it was my fault that John had picked Mary over Sherlock. Of course it had turned out to be because both my parents are dunderheads who can’t recognize love until it bites them in the arse, but I didn’t know this at the time. 

The particular day I planned to hang my self was the Sunday following a bad week. John and Mary were gone on some sort of romantic vacation, and dad was away on a case. Being home alone wasn’t what troubled me. John wouldn’t answer any of my texts or emails, and the one time I called, Mary picked up and told me that John was getting annoyed at the calls and texts, which were, in his mind “interrupting his time with Mary.”

As you can probably guess, this didn’t exactly help my guilt, or my depression. So that day I woke up with the ambition to kill myself. I had a rope, since Sherlock had some for reasons I could not always understand, and there was a light fixture on the ceiling of the living room that I could tie it too.

I dragged a chair from the kitchen and brought it under the fixture, then got onto the chair and tied the rope into a noose, securing it so it wouldn’t snap.

I put on the floor next to the chair a USB drive with “please open,” written in sharpie on it. I’d put my cover of “World’s End Dancehall” on it, and a short note apologizing for all the trouble I’d put John through, and an assurance that Sherlock wasn’t abusive. Also a hope that the two of them could be happy together, after his relationship with Mary ran its course.

Then I stepped back onto the chair and carefully placed the noose around my neck. Closing my eyes, I kicked back against the chair, toppling it and placing all the weight around my neck. I heard footsteps, but I was convinced they were only my imagination, the firing of neurons in a dying brain. The choking sensation in my throat increased, and then there was only blackness.


	2. Beautiful

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still own nothing. I’d also like to give credit to my awesome friend who shall remain anon, who is doing the RP that has inspired this fic. Unbetaed. Song is Beautiful by Mariah Carrey.

I regained the ability to hear first. Then my sense of smell, then taste, and finally touch. My eyes were shut, so I couldn’t tell when I regained my sight. But I felt oddly disconnected, as if my body and my mind were two separate entities. _Is this heaven?_ I thought, thinking that if it was, it was a sore disappointment from the pearly gates one expected. Also, my throat felt sore. Wouldn’t I have no pain if I were dead?

Then I noticed a steady beeping noise and the scent of antiseptic. The cloth I felt against my skin was thin and itchy. A hospital. I was in a hospital. Someone had found me and cut me down before I had asphyxiated completely. Apparently my weight wasn’t great enough to cause my neck to snap.

My first emotion at this realization was disappointment. I had failed even at killing myself. Great. Just great. I pried my eyes open, sure that the only person who’d be there would be a nameless nurse and Margo, my girlfriend. So you can understand my surprise when I saw not only Margo, but Dad as well, the both of them sitting in decidedly uncomfortable looking hospital chairs. 

“Vicky, don’t you DARE ever do that to me again!” Margo nearly sobbed, throwing herself at me as soon as she noticed I was awake. Obviously she’d been pretty badly hurt by my attempted suicide, because she usually wasn’t this huggy. I hugged her the best I could while lying on a hospital bed, one hand tethered by an IV.

“I share the sentiment. When I found you, I... I couldn’t think,” this statement gave me pause. My dad’s always thinking, that’s why he can’t sleep very well, since he’s incapable of shutting off his brain. To think that finding me near death made his mind skitter to a halt... well to be honest, it shocked me. At that point I didn’t think that anyone really cared whether I lived or died. Mary’s words had affected me more than I wanted to admit, even to myself. 

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, closing my eyes in shame. Had I really been that thoughtless, that selfish, to try to kill myself? My family wasn’t that big, and it hurt that John apparently didn’t care enough to come and visit me, but I had dad and I had Margo, which was nice. 

“You don’t have to apologize, girlfriend-of-mine,” Margo whispered somewhere near my ear, since we were still hugging, “s’not your fault that the Monster got a hold of you.” The Monster was the name she gave my depression. She claimed it was a beast, a Monster that took parts of me away. 

My dad, who was sitting near the foot of the bed, looked up at me and said, “I fear you may have inherited the Holmes trait of mental illness. Or at the very least the Holmes trait of attracting bullies,” he said ruefully. 

I answered as Margo pulled herself off the bed, back to her chair. As she’s a bit shorter than me, this took a great deal of shuffling around. “You found the USB.”

“Yes. As I was waiting for the ambulance, I noticed it near the chair,” he pulled the flash drive out of a pocket and showed it to me. He gestured as if to give it to me, but I shook my head. Bad associations and all that. 

At that moment I noticed that Margo looked like she’s missed a good amount of sleep. Dad looked the same as normal, but was projecting more emotion than usual for him in public spaces.

“How long was I out?” I asked, looking at Sherlock for the answer. 

“One day. They kept you sedated for fear you’d try to harm yourself,” this made sense. Since, in retrospect, I hadn’t really been thinking rationally at the time I attempted suicide, I wasn’t sure how I’d react if I’d woken soon after. Though I don’t remember dreaming in my drugged sleep, I’m sure my mind was able to sort itself out. 

“Where’s John?” I half-dreaded the answer, but I needed to know. 

Margo suddenly looked murderous, and Sherlock just looked sad. “Mary picked up, and forced me not to tell him. She said that I was probably lying to try to drive them apart.”

Thinking about John and Mary’s vacation reminded me of something. I cursed myself and whatever drugs I was on for my mental slowness. “Margo, aren’t you supposed to be going back to the States today?” I asked. If I’d been out for a day, and today was Monday, then she was supposed to be on a plane flying back. 

“You think that I’d go with you trying to kill yourself? Ye of little faith.” I laughed, happy that I had these two. If I’d woken up alone, I don’t know how I would have reacted. My mood had rocketed back up again, but it might have stayed down if they hadn’t been there. John’s absence was a bit of a dampener, but other than that, I was happy. Of course, the drugs helped. 

“Thank you for being here, dad, Margo-the-fantastic-girlfriend,” my mood turned somber as I added, “I’m sorry you had to find me dad,” turning to him. I hoped he’d forgive me for having to put him through that.

“I’m glad I found you Victoria. It would have been horrible to lose you. Do you really think that John and I will be together?” Ah yes, the other part of my note. Now to deal with dunderhead numero uno.

“Yes. Mary’s driving her relationship into the ground. She’s being a crazy clingy bitch, and the jealously likely won’t help. Also John’s head over heals in love with you. He’s just scared of loving you, cause of the whole you know, he lost you once thing,” I said, referring to his “suicide”. 

Oddly enough, we hadn’t mentioned his false death until then. “Yes, I do hope he forgives me.”

“Don’t worry, dad, he already has. I could see that when you came back. He just needs time, as do you. You two dunderheads will be happy, mark my words,” an odd conversation to have in a hospital room, after nearly killing myself, I know. It’s not like my issues were over, it’s just at the moment my mood was on the “happy” side of the pendulum swing. If you don’t believe me, I can show you the scars that are issue of when it swings in the opposite direction. But at this point, that wasn’t important. What was important was that two of the people closest to me had spent time with me. 

“Word game?” I asked after a few seconds. If I was going to be bored in a hospital room for another 36 hours, I might as well do something to try to keep my mood on the happy side. 

“Rhyming journeys?” Sherlock asked hopefully. That’s one of the ones he’s good at. 

“Sure, as long as you don’t use obscure Turkish villages that no one’s heard of except you and the inhabitants.”

“Fine,” he said, annoyed. 

“I won’t use American towns no one’s heard of,” Margo promised, pouting.

“Oh, it’s fine if you do it. You’re fantastic. He’s my dad.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I give credit to my awesome friend, who helped me figure out the name for Victoria’s girlfriend during our RP. A warning, there will be a timeskip between this chapter and the next. About three years or so.  
> Also, cookies to those who get the reference at the end.


	3. Perfect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three years later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song is Perfect by Simple Plan. The M rating is for the explicit language in this part. Which is only a little explicit, but the level of explicitness of the words made me go with KA’s recommendation that I bump up the rating. Merely paranoia on my part, of course.

It was about three years since I tried to kill myself. I’d never told John. Even though he’d started dating dad, I still felt convinced that he would be disgusted. I guess, in retrospect, that that’s a bit stupid, but to be honest, at that point I still sort of believed Mary, even though I thought her long gone at that point.

I needed to talk to him for a reason I can’t remember (something to do with... an experiment of dad’s... and cats... I think), so I entered his room in a fashion classic of all good Holmes men and women. I barged in. And got an eyeful of what was very plainly, John with his dick up Mary’s vagina. And he certainly looked like he was enjoying it. 

I hightailed it out of there, slamming the door shut behind me. I couldn’t think. My second dad was cheating on my dad, with the very woman who’d caused me to nearly end my life at 11. I dimly recall thinking that it was poetic that he was doing it in the room he’d shared with dad for a few years now. 

I went upstairs to my room and did a full body flop on my bed. I then proceeded to grab my giant panda, Giant Panda, from where he was sitting on my pillow and hug him against my chest. 

What was I going to do? Should I tell Sherlock? He’d know from John immediately after seeing him, but maybe it’d hurt him less if he learned it without seeing it?

I put Giant Panda down, grabbed my Security Fedora and my wallet and made my way to the street outside the flat. I hailed the taxi, got in, and gave the direction for St. Bart’s. All the while I was feeling numb. Not like the depression I feel when the pendulum swings, but emptiness. Like there was absolutely nothing inside me. It’s terrifying to think about now.

I paid the taxi driver, then slowly made my way down to the lab. My dad was where I expected him to do, doing god knows what to a corpse that he likely had been given by Molly. The poor woman still hadn’t gotten over her hopeless crush on him. She liked me though, because apparently having a crush on someone automatically makes the quirks of their progeny more tolerable. 

He stopped...whatever it was...you know what I really do not want to get into details on this one...and turned to me. That’s what is awesome about my dad. He’s always doing these experiments and cases and whatnot, but he’s perfectly willing to drop everything he’s doing and talk to me. 

I took a deep breath and adjusted my Fedora. “John’s cheated on you. With Mary.” I said quietly, looking down at my feet. 

After a few seconds I looked up again, and the expression I saw on my dad’s face before he schooled it into blankness was what shattered the numbness inside me. We’re not really huggy, but at that moment I needed affection. So I hugged him. I know that the morgue in the basement of a hospital isn’t really the best place for emotional scenes, but we’re different like that. 

He hugged back, awkwardly at first, then holding on to me as if I was his lifeline. Maybe I was, at that point. He’d told me a story a few years before, of boyhood romance that ended in his downward spiral towards addiction. That’s why it had taken him until after he faked his death to admit to John what he felt. Now all of that was crashing down around his ears. 

Bad enough that John was cheating on my dad, but he was cheating on him with _Mary_. Which, honestly, was possibly the worst choice ever. However she’d acted towards him, her actions relating to me and my dad were a bit less forgivable. 

“I’m sorry,” I said into his shoulder. My insides were swirling with anger, betrayal and residual smidgens of guilt. 

“Why are you apologizing?” he asked, his voice expressionless. Another bit of Holmes lore I’d like to share with you is that we feel emotions more deeply, more intensely than most people. I know, I know, you’d think we’d be emotionally retarded, with our insane levels of intelligence and all that, but whatever makes us Holmeses tick decided as a “screw you” type of thing to give us intense emotions, and take away our capacity to deal with them. So emotionless tones usually meant dad would have cried, if we were somewhere he felt safe. Which he didn’t, not here, despite the familiarity. The only times I’ve ever seen him cry was when John kicked him out on his return (not that I was complaining. At the time I was one very pissed 11 year old.) , and at home after I finally got back from the hospital after I attempted suicide. 

“For your loss,” I explained. I was pretty sure that dad would start crying, but maybe not for a while. His room could no longer be considered a safe place, at least not for him. 

“John isn’t dead.”

“He might as well be. You work out your emotions, and I’ll confront him, okay? I’ve got some images that he’s to blame for, that I sincerely wish I could unsee.” I gave my dad one more squeeze and pulled away. He went back to his work, but he looked rather distracted. Not surprising, really, considering the circumstances. 

I decided to confront John in person, instead of over text. I felt very strongly that it would be impossible to convey how pissed off I felt in writing. 

Which is how I found myself taking another taxi back to 221B. I waited across the street for someone to come out. Instead of the both of them leaving, I saw Mary exit alone. She looked triumphant. Obviously, she thought she’d won. 

“Not on my watch, dollface,” I muttered to myself, suppressing what sounded a bit like a growl.

I made my way across the street during a rare lull in traffic, running, miraculously not getting hit even though it was around 10pm. Opening the door to the flat, I all but ran up the steps. I was tempted to stomp, but decided that I’d stopped being five nine years before, and didn’t. 

John was standing in the kitchen, making tea. The normality of the situation gave me pause. Was he really so callous as to not care about what he’d just done? Then I looked at him, really looked at him, and noticed the fact that the guilt was nearly tangible enough to be seen. 

I quietly walked up to him and removed my Fedora. Then I slapped him. Hard. Hard enough anyway that had he not just put it down, he would have dropped the tea. “What were you thinking?” I asked him. I purposely filled my tone with calm, as if I were commenting on everyone’s favorite talking point, the weather. He flinched. Good, I thought. You hurt my dad, you should feel pain. 

“I don’t...I don’t know.” he said, looking down at his hands. “I’m sorry.”

At that moment, I felt myself be filled with insane amounts of anger. Or possibly even rage. “Sorry?” I asked, still calm on the surface. “you’re _sorry_. I walked in on you. I walked in on you having sex with _Mary_. Who I though long gone, ever since you broke up with her, and justly so.”

“I can explain,” he whispered, still looking at the floor.

“You can explain.” I laughed, any sense of calm leaving me. “you can explain why my dad is currently hurting enough that he refuses to emote? You can explain why he’s currently at the same level of emotional pain as when I tried to hang myself?” 

I clamped my hands over my mouth. I had not just told him that. I’d never mentioned my attempt to end my own life to John, not wanting to burden him with my pain. Also, I think a part of me that still believed Mary thought that he knew, but didn’t care.

“You what?” he asked, eyes wide, frozen.

The metaphorical cat was out of its equally metaphorical bag, so I decided I might as well tell him the rest.

“About three years ago, when I was 11, I tried to hang myself from a light fixture in the living room. Thankfully my dad arrived just after I kicked the chair out from under me, and he managed to cut me down.” I explained all this in a monotone, trying to get the facts from one of the most painful periods of my life out into the air as words as quickly as I could. “When I woke up, dad and Margo were in my hospital room. Which made me realize how royally screwed my decision was. We played a word game, then I went back to sleep. After that it was your normal boring hospital stay, since I was stuck in suicide watch for another 36 until I was released.”

“How come I never knew this?” he finally asked, after a silence that probably only lasted a few heartbeats but seemed to stretch on forever.

“You were on vacation, with Mary. None of my texts were reaching you and on my only phone call, two days before I attempted suicide, Mary picked up and said you weren’t appreciating me bothering you.” I explained. I didn’t tell him yet what Mary had done, long before that week, that had contributed to my eventual attempt at self extermination. 

John looked confused at that moment, as if something in what I’d said hadn’t made sense. “What month was this?” he asked, as if to clarify something.

“August, ironic, I know, considering it’s the month where I was born.”

“Then that doesn’t work. I didn’t go on a vacation with Mary at any point during that month. I only went out of London once, to go to a medical conference in Edinburgh.  She went as well, as it was relevant to her practice.” Did I mention that Mary was a practicing pediatrician? Irony in its purest form, in my opinion. “I lost my phone until the day before I left.” I stared at him for half a second, my brain scrambling to process this new information.

“You were at a medical conference? She told me you were going on a vacation. Then she told me later that you’d thought my texts were a bit clingy. The phone call was what made the pendulum swing.” John’s eyes widened. Though he hadn’t known it at the time, he knew very well now what I meant when I said that. Though dad had a different kind then me, John had attempted to convince us to go on pills. Which had failed miserably, to my frustration and dad’s delight, since it meant he could go on about how psychology wasn’t really science. 

“You had an episode?”

“A pretty bad one, considering I did try to hang myself. In retrospect that is rather Victorian of me, don’t you think? Be happy I didn’t try to use your gun, maybe I’d be dead.”

“You never said anything.”

“It never came up.” I decided to tell him, now or never and everything. “I thought you knew, just didn’t care.”

The look in his eyes at that moment reminded me suspiciously of the mother bear I’d seen at a zoo once. That particular mother bear had then made the news a few weeks later for attacking a crazy guy who’d tried to kill her son. The genders were flipped but the metaphor was probably appropriate.

“I will never not care about you,” he said quietly. “You are my daughter, or at the very least I consider you my daughter. And I know what I did today means you and Sherlock might never forgive me. I have no explanation. One moment I was drinking in a bar with some army buddies, the next I’m waking up next to Mary.” he looked down. 

“You were drugged?” I asked, incredulous.

“Cliché isn’t it? Well, you can forgive me, eventually right?”

“John. I don’t know if you’re telling the truth or not. But knowing Mary, that might really be a possibility. Just a warning, you should probably know that I told dad. And he’s upset enough that he willingly hugged me back in public.” I told him. John of course, being by a now an expert in Holmesien behavior both rational and irrational, understood the significance. 

“I suppose I’ll wait here for him. It’s not like I can do anything else,” he said, sitting down at the table. I made my way upstairs to my room, deciding that the place I should be was not here.

“He loves you, you know,” I said turning towards him. 

“I love him as well. I just hope he can forgive me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m a bit iffy about the dialogue. I’m not very good at it. I’m happy with this chapter, it’s the first chapter I’ve written that’s more than 2000 words.


	4. Re:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock comes home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song is Re: by Hatsune Miku.

When I got into my room, I grabbed my computer, my headphones and my mic. I thought that I may as well get some singing done. I was at the moment working on a cover of Magnet by Megurine Luka and Hatsune Miku. I was doing a duet with Margo. Except she was in America, so we were using the slightly complicated method people use to do duets when they’re on different continents. She recorded her part, I recorded mine. I then emailed my part as an mp3 to Margo. She put the off-vocal and both our parts together, then email the new mp3 to me. I’d then use it in iMovie with an MMD I’d create using models based off our internet selves.

After several seconds of internal debate, I sent off _He thinks he was drugged -V_ to my dad. 

I got _Is he speaking the truth? -S_ a few seconds later.

_There was no sign of him lying. He apparently does not remember having sex. -V_

_Impressive, considering he usually has a better memory for this particular activity than I do. -S_

_Don’t need to know that dad, don’t need to know that. -V_

_Did you see Mary when you returned to the flat? -S_

_She looked triumphant, the harpy. -V_

_Where is John? -S_

_Waiting for you, the air heavy with guilt around him. -V_

_You? -S_

_Considering this may end up with loud sex, I’m working on my Magnet cover. -V_

_Enjoy yourself. -S_

_When do I not? -V_

With that, I decided to get back to what I was doing. I had just placed the headphones over my ears and opened the recording application, when I heard the front door close loudly. Dad was home. Considering my room is right over the living room, I thought that maybe listening to this fight might be rather entertaining.

I heard what was likely a human voice (probably dad’s), but it was too muffled for me to understand. Blast it. I grabbed Giant Panda and walked silently to the staircase, and sat with my knees against my chest and my chin on Giant Panda’s really fluffy head. 

“-believe you.” Dad was speaking. He sounded emotional. Which was good. Emoting was a thing he’d only recently started being able to do on a regular basis. Blankness meant the emotions were too intense for him to deal with, but emotion meant they were down to a manageable level.

“You forgive me?” John asked, sounding hopeful. Also very sad, and very old. Like a less extreme version of how he was for the six months dad was dead. Thinking about in, my 11th year was pretty packed. Not only did dad die then come back, but I attempted suicide. Impressive, on my part.

“You forgave me for faking my own death, didn’t you?” Dad said quietly. I’ve seen some of the scars, the Hiatus was never a nice topic for him.

“That was three and a half years ago. Of course I do!”

“You didn’t seem to care about us, for a while after I came back. I understood your anger at the beginning, since you’d remade your life with Mary, et al., but when you told Victoria you didn’t care, then didn’t show up in the hospital after she tried to kill herself, that confused me.”

“I don’t understand, I never knew Victoria attempted suicide, why would I if I wasn’t told?” The same papa bear tone was coming back. It was oddly comforting, but I still snuggled more with Giant Panda. I may have been 14, but Giant Panda is well... a giant panda. And it was comforting to have a squishy thing while listening to this.

“Mary said you knew, but didn’t care. I didn’t want to believe her, but..., I don’t know.”

“I was at a medical conference in Edinburgh. My phone went missing until the day before I returned,” a short silence followed that statement, followed by a sigh. “Mary stole my phone, didn’t she?”

“It would seem so.”

“I knew she was clingy but I never thought she’d drive Victoria to _suicide_. If I’d come home and found her dead, I don’t know how I would have reacted. I consider her my daughter. I thought she considered me another dad, but I guess my actions today went and ballsed that up.” _You’re definitely my dad. I wouldn’t tolerate you otherwise-V_ I sent to his phone.

I heard a snort, and a curious noise from John. _Nice to know Victoria that I’m “tolerated”_

_Better than Mary. -V_

_Anyone is better than her._

_I used the term harpy. -V_

_That’s fits. And I thought you were going to be working on your song?_

_This was more interesting. -V_

_Your dad and I fighting was interesting?_

_I only heard the forgiveness part. -V_

_Ah. Where are you?_

_On the steps with Giant Panda listening. -V_

_Giant Panda?_

_My Giant Panda. Now go back to whatever it was you were doing. And I will be going to work on my song now to avoid hearing the almost inevitable noises of parent sex. -V_

I closed the text app on my phone and locked it. Making my way back upstairs, and returned to my room, and planned to start work on my song in earnest this time.

A muffled thum p was heard, then a door slam. I hastily grabbed my headphones again and started playing the song. “Kabosoi hi ga kokoro no hashi ni tomoru itsu no ma ni ka moehirogaru netsujou”. Magnet, a song about forbidden love. Appropriate, were we Victorian. But really, a beautiful song in all. Maybe I’d record Re: next. It fit dad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please review. Or Kudos.

**Author's Note:**

> Please review! They are like cookies. I love them a lot.


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